Jul 26, 2012

So some dude name Joe Peacock posted a rant complaining about too many cute girls 'faking being geeks' nowadays. I won't bother to even address how many ways his article is crap, since Joe Scalzi did it for me, but the part of Joe's rebuttal that really stood out to me and truly sums up why I have so much affection for geek culture despite it's warts was this:

"Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I
think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the
true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major
difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees
someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say 'Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I
love.' When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love,
their reaction is to say 'ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET
US LOVE IT TOGETHER.''

Any jerk can love a thing. It’s the sharing that makes geekdom awesome."

THAT is exactly why I embrace the 'geek' label, and will wear that term proudly til the day I die. The exuberant love of sharing our passions with each other without fear of being judged for 'caring too much' or 'taking it too seriously' is such a great and fun part of geek culture, and why I believe that all our geek communities can only get better by accepting more different types of people in them. I echo what Joe says at the end of his essay:

"Anyone can be a geek. Any way they want to. That means you too. Whoever you are."

Jul 16, 2012

It's a fact that 2012 has been a disappointing year for 'AAA' MMORPGs. The highly publicized implosion of 38 Studios and the stumbling performance of SWTOR has led some gaming pundits to question if the entire genre has been put in peril. I've already addressed why I disagree that those games' failures were because 'the market is over-saturated with MMOs', but there IS something to be said about the chilling effect such high budget crash-and-burns can have on twitchy investors who may not know enough about MMOs to understand why all the money put into those studios failed to provide the desired returns.

The hard fact is, making games is a business. It is generally required by AAA development studios to convince people who may not be gamers or even particularly interested in gaming to fork over considerable amounts of money to fund their projects. These sorts of investors are the types who read statements like 'the market for MMOs is obviously saturated because not even 200 million dollars can make a game MMO players want to play', and decide it's not a good idea to invest in MMO projects for the forseeable future. Thus, even though the true reasons why certain big-budget games did poorly is more complex than that, every MMO project going forward gets stigmatized as a 'low chance of being profitable' before it even gets out of the gate. If reality gets framed as being MMORPGs as a whole that are not profitable rather than just over-derivative WoW clones, then yes, the genre as a whole will suffer. And there is a real risk that the latter will be the message taken away from this year by the investors of tomorrow.

Now, ArenaNet has not disclosed how much money has gone into Guild Wars 2 yet, but I'm going to assume it's at least $100 million. I could be totally wrong of course but when devs have made various comments that basically admit cost was not their major consideration and outright state they're betting the company on this game, it makes me suspicious that the final number is going to be pretty big.

And not only has ArenaNet been coy about publicizing how much they've spent on Guild Wars 2, but also have been setting some pretty confident goals for themselves, such as being the best service provider in the entire industry. They are setting the bar for themselves high, with very public statements of confidence, and investors and other such influential people in the industry are definitely watching them closely to see if they can deliver.

If Guild Wars 2 faceplants, it will be the second epic-budget AAA MMO released in 2012 to do poorly and the third bad end to a very expensive MMO project this year, and that will definitely have severe consequences for the AAA MMORPG as a genre. Because of that grim possibility, even people who are not interested in the game should be hoping it has a great launch and a positive market performance because Guild Wars 2 may actually be a 'MMO Messiah' if it can achieve it's lofty ambitions, albeit a savior in a different way than most gamers define the term.

It's good to know that people besides gamers have started to 'raise concerns' about the quality of Zynga's titles. The apologists for that type of 'social game' can't claim it's just hardcore sour grapes anymore (if they're even still around at this point).

Hopefully the fact that Zynga so openly pushed the entire Skinner Box-style game mechanic to the furthest level possible while maintaining only a veneer of 'gameplay' has encouraged future MMORPG developers to move past the tired grind and RNG-based carrot-on-stick standbys into creative, new (and less toxic) gameplay systems. Because I think one reason why Zynga games are so reviled by gamers is because they are, at their core, disturbingly familiar to many of us as exposing the type of mechanics at the core of many our own superior 'real' games, and on a certain level we resented having to acknowledge it.

Jul 6, 2012

How many other people, after doing such a terrible job running a development team and company, would get a second chance like this? Is it because he's 'One of the Guys Who Designed EQ' and knows the right people and has a cool personality? When Vanguard got bought up and put on life support by SOE (which was an oddly nice gesture of them), I had initially gotten the impression it was because someone high up there was being sentimental, and this latest development just reinforces my suspicion.

Either way, in the light of the recent examples of high-profile MMO projects being brought low by gross incompetence, and the importance of developers today to be professionals aware of current market realities and not arrogant posers blinded by their personal 'Vision', I don't understand why this guy, who showed himself as being a terrible leader and an out-of-touch designer, is the one who gets chosen to be given another chance in the gaming business. It just baffles me.

Jul 5, 2012

"Pathea Games is proud to announce the studio's next game, Planet Explorers. Planet Explorers is an open world voxel-based adventure rpg
game set on a distant planet. The game uses a new OpenCL system based on
the Unity 3D engine to allow players to change the terrain in anyway,
create new objects in any form, and do it anywhere.

In Planet Explorers, it is the year 2287, one of the first colony
ships sent out by Earth arrives at the planet Maria, in the Epsilon Indi
Star System. During its landing sequence, something appears in front of
the massive ship that causes it to lose control and crash into the
planet. Some of the colonists survive in lifeboats, but what they find
is an unforgiving land filled with creatures ready to outlast the
visitors from Earth. Now the survivors must explorer, gather, build,
create, fight, and ultimately, conquer the land."

Sounds like a non-cube story-based Minecraftish kind of thing; I'm going to have to keep an eye out for this one!